Day 9 - Voluntary Lock Down

Had a dream I'd contracted the virus. Not really surprising and I'm sure I'm not the only one that did. If there was ever a collective consciousness focussed on one thing, this would no doubt be it. Akin my daughter's advice, it would be far better that we all focus on staying healthy.

More auto-cancellations this morning and this time from Class Pass. Booking.com hadn't auto-cancelled but had suggested I did, for my Ubud holiday. I'd been leaving it as I had been trying to work out how my home-stay hosts could still be paid. Cancellation at this point would essentially settle that. Done.

Surprisingly Air Asia hasn't implemented any auto option, other than the customer needing to deal with Ava (their bot) and be driven around in circles. I'd tried this before and found it even less effective the second time. This time the page wouldn't even load.

It's pretty simple Air Asia. There's a travel ban. You've cancelled flights. Travel isn't possible. Just apply the credits and save us all the nightmare.

Had a call from my Dad, who was suggesting I got onto the bank, as he had, to put mortgage on pause. Good advice. I thought I needed to wait until after the 27th. I had a crack and, after filling out a form to register my interest, was able to request a call back. I wonder how long that will take.

It was my daughter's first day of home-schooling with the majority. This was awesome and also presenting its own set of issues. Lots of social (online) interaction and not much work getting done. Oh well. Fair enough. Disruption is inevitable. At least it's social. She has been on her own for a week.

I checked in on her to which she replied "Slowly sinking through. Haha." Oh dear

After a morning of predominantly unfulfilling admin, I thought I'd get out into the garden and clean a few things up, that had been bugging me (including the bathroom bamboo!). Didn't spend too long, just enough to nurture it a bit.

I was really keen to get stuck into the outdoor table. It's a solid timber, round table that my family had eaten around when I was a child. I'd adopted it form my parents about 20 years ago and had restored it a couple of times. It was now a well-sheltered, outdoor table and in some desperate need of love and restoration. As we have a 'big family' Zoom dinner planned for Friday night, thanks to my older sister, I thought that it might be nice to bring a much loved (rather than neglected) family gathering symbol into that picture.

It was also part of a priority to increase the number of enjoyable and functional working space options, as extended lockdown is going to require it.

Toward the end of the day, I got stuck in. The second time I'd restored it, I'd done a half-arsed job. The first time I'd been into using two-pack estapols and I hadn't had the patience the completely remove it last time. This time would be different. Despite the harsh 40-grit sandpaper and high-powered random orbital sander I was using, it took quite some time and patience to scratch through the disappointingly corrupted veneer; to finally start exposing the natural beauty beneath.

With all that time to think, I started meditating on how this process might be parallel to what we're currently experiencing as a global and local society.

The natural beauty of our society has certainly been hidden beneath a shitty veneer for a long time. It's going to take time and it's going to be rough. The veneer has and will desperately hold on. Things will get much worse. Then .. eventually .. the natural beauty will shine through, little by little and then on mass.

Meanwhile we're taking bets on the number of cases by the end of the week. I'm not sure this is healthy fun.

Had a quick look at the latest news, to find the UK going to the next level lockdown measures, the US spiralling out of control and Trump claiming it would only be a few weeks before they were out of it. It occurred to me that the US almost got away with voting in Trump. At this point it's looking like they're about to pay an unrecoverable price. I reckon there will be an intervention soon (probably covert). This can't go on.

I'd noticed I have some readers in Brazil which prompted my interest in how they're doing. I hadn't heard anything and it is certainly a massive and vulnerable population. Their number (of recorded) cases is close behind Australia's and their death toll well in front. President Bolsonaro has been behaving like other naive leaders around the world and even contradicting his own health minister.

This will certainly be one to watch, along with Indonesia, which will probably take over the global spotlight in the next week.

I reached out to a friend in the UK who is in lockdown with her neighbour, so they can at least be in lockdown with someone. Great idea! I wonder if they'll have kids :)

After a super healthy dinner and using up 100 Humans (next!), we called it a night. But wait. Maybe I'll try the My Gov website again. The east coast should be asleep. Made some small and slow progress before it crashed again and so did I. Baby steps.